Russia's 'Holy Soviet empire' in eastern Ukraine

The animosity between the Russian Orthodox Church and the old Soviet Union seems forgotten in eastern Ukraine, where symbols mix to create a fascinating fusion identity, writes Matthew Dal Santo.

A few days before Easter, the Russian news site Lenta ran a fascinating slideshow with pictures of pro-Russian militiamen and their supporters in eastern Ukraine.

Two things immediately strike the viewer.

The first is the professional nature of the bearing and equipment of the so-called "self-defence" militias that have seized government buildings in the self-proclaimed "People's Republic of Donetsk". As NATO has itself concluded, these disciplined and clearly physically fit men equipped with the same automatic weapons, fatigues, helmets and knee pads, must be Russian forces.

We're clearly witnessing an undeclared Russian invasion of Ukraine's Donbass region, whose factories once played an integral part in the Soviet Union's arms industry and still supply the Russian armed forces with vital components. The broad Soviet-era avenues and ubiquitous monuments to Lenin in its cities - Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk - display the strength of Soviet nostalgia in the region.

Also striking, however, among the pro-Russian demonstrators are religious symbols and their frequent commingling with Soviet ones.

Take, for example, the picture above of what the Kremlin describes as spontaneously organised pro-Russian demonstrators escorting an icon of the Virgin and Child from a Ukrainian security forces station in Lugansk, presumably to protect it from the risk of fighting.

In Orthodox theology, an icon makes present the holy personage it depicts. In this case, the reverence in the eyes not only of the soldier clutching the image but of the whole troop suggests that these servants of the Russian state believe the Virgin really is among them.

In another photograph, a more obviously "local" man is seen erecting a large Orthodox cross in front of the same Ukrainian government building from which the icon was removed. In the foreground, someone else waves a Russian flag. Symbols of Orthodoxy, it seems, are as elemental a sign of Russian-ness as official national emblems. With Putin firmly in charge in the Kremlin, the old tsarist trinity of autocracy-Orthodoxy-ethnicity seems but a breath away.

But the emblems of the old Soviet Union also appear to play an important role in focusing and projecting the protesters' sense of identity. Thus, in the same place a day later a pro-Russian woman raises a victory salute in front of a barricade topped with the USSR's familiar red banner.

Now, the Soviet Union was an officially atheist state. From the very moment of its seizure of power in 1917, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat violently suppressed all religion - Marx's "opium of the people" - in the name of international communism. Its campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church, which formed a central pillar of that tsarist order the Bolshevik revolution sought to destroy, was particularly thorough and ruthless.

Yet the animosity between church and party seems forgotten in eastern Ukraine, where to be or identify as Russian in the 21st century seems to mean invoking the symbols of both an atheist USSR and an almost ur-Russian Orthodox Christianity with ancient roots in Byzantium.

One photograph, in particular, captures the incongruous collage of emblems: a man presents to the camera a shield bearing a large, Byzantine-style icon of a warrior saint while over his shoulder the Soviet hammer and sickle flutter on their distinctive red background.

It's well known - not least for having been repeated at every opportunity in the Western press over the past two months - that, personally at least, Putin considers the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century". If Putin really does want to rebuild the Soviet Jerusalem, it appears not a few in Donbass would like to help him.

On the other hand, since coming to power in 2000 Putin has also forged a strong alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, and in particular with Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow, who some accuse of having been a KGB informer. During Putin's presidency, the Church has regained its position as one of Russia's leading institutions and it's said that some two thirds of Russians identify with it at least nominally.

Separately, nostalgia for the Soviet Union and the explosion of Orthodox spirituality have been constants in Russian cultural life since the USSR's collapse in 1991. What these photographs from Ukraine do, however, is ask us how they fit together in shaping a sense of modern Russian identity.

Today's Russians, it seems, want to be and be seen to be heirs to whole paradoxical and contradictory sweep of their history.

To return to our pro-Russian demonstrators in Donbass, is it a return to the atheist USSR that they want or a revival of the dream of Moscow as an Orthodox "Third Rome"? The temptation, of course, is to call them confused and pity the Russians their schizophrenia. Only the truly disorientated would combine Lenin and the Virgin Mary.

The other problem with this apparently split identity - collectively or in its separate Soviet and Orthodox components - is that it isn't coterminous with Russia's present borders.

Whatever desperate groping after meaning this mixing of historical symbols implies, the truth is we would ignore it if it weren't responsible for today's geopolitical confrontation. To help us take it seriously, however, we might consider shifting time and place dramatically.

On Christmas Day in the year AD 800, at an impromptu ceremony in Rome's St Peter's basilica, Pope Leo III crowned one Charles, king of the Franks, Roman emperor. There hadn't been a Roman emperor in Western Europe for more than 300 years - and the last, the forlornly named Romulus Augustulus, hadn't received his crown from the Pope, though he and his predecessors for more than a century had been Christian.

But even in the ecclesiastical republic that was early medieval Rome, the sense that "there should be an emperor" remained strong. By bestowing on Charles - Charlemagne - an imperial title, Leo reunited two strands of Western European history that time, and Rome's unexpected fall, had sundered: the Christian church and the Roman empire that had once persecuted it.

I think that events in Ukraine point to the mending of a similarly sundered identity. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many Russians were understandably confused: fear and confusion are the two overwhelming sentiments that come through in Solzhenitsyn's Russia in Freefall, a moving anthology of encounters with ordinary Russians in the 1990s.

Rather than confusion or schizophrenia, however, the mixing of symbols seen in Ukraine seems to point to a desire to unify and, from a certain point of view, heal. Not only do the protesters proclaim the geographical unity of the Russian nation in spite of international borders that many see as arbitrary and unjustified, they also proclaim the historical unity of the Russian nation through time.

Today's Russians, it seems, want to be and be seen to be heirs to whole paradoxical and contradictory sweep of their history, ready perhaps to see themselves in what we might, generously, call the "best" of their country's unusually tumultuous past.

Part of the challenge of the new world order will be to deal with competing, if not rival, visions of national exceptionalism.

Thus, Soviet symbols recall a great and powerful but reassuring land where there was work, if not material plenty, for all; those of the Church proclaim an Orthodox people specially chosen by God to carry the unique light of Orthodoxy in the world - an idea whose place in Russian culture goes all the way back to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

In the long run, the re-assemblage of the torn shreds of Russian identity would be a good thing for the world. A confident Russia, at peace with itself and no longer haunted by its demons, would be more likely to act as a cooperative member of the international community than the prickly, navel-gazing state with a gaping chip on its shoulder that we've become used to.

But events in Ukraine show it won't necessarily be easy for the rest of the world to accommodate it. Since the collapse of Communism in 1989, the world has had to live with only one really exceptional nation - the United States. Part of the challenge of the new world order, which events in Ukraine seem to suggest is already upon us, will be to deal with competing, if not rival, visions of national exceptionalism.

We can condemn the Kremlin's destabilising strategy in Ukraine and the underhanded tactics it has used to pursue it. But the symbolic bricolage of the Russian Ukrainians who do support both we would do well not to dismiss as misguided, deluded or confused but as the building blocks of a durable and potentially positive form of Russian patriotism - in Russia at least, if not Ukraine.

The men who had founded Rome's empire and ruled it until Constantine's controversial conversion in AD 312 were almost all of them implacably hostile to Christianity. Though paradoxical, the medieval marriage of church and empire was a central anchor of Western European identity until the reformation. And a baptized "Holy" Roman Empire remained, in theory, the leading European state until Napoleon abolished it in 1805.

A "Holy Soviet" empire might sound like an impossible contradiction to us, a mishmash that only points to the desperate and pitiable nature of the cause in whose favour such symbols have been deployed. Yet equally strange fusions have lent unity to other civilizations for hundreds of years, including our own. (And a similar process also seems to be under way in modern China where a once-hostile Communist Party is today resurrecting the ancient teachings of Confucius.)

I'll finish with one more photograph from eastern Ukraine: a pro-Russian militia man kisses the cross that hangs from a priest's neck. Putin might be trying to turn back the clock on the Soviet Union's demise, but it's to the Orthodox Church his foot soldiers turn for blessing. To us, this is an extremely surprising thing for the servant of any state to do; in various forms, however, we might have to get used it.